The oddest thing about Google's success is that it is, at least in part, built upon a stunning, and inexplicable, failure by Microsoft. It is mind-boggling that Google can do a better job searching my computer than the manufacturer of the computer's own operating system. Ridiculous, really. Finding stuff should be fundamental. And yet, for years, I have been gnashing my teeth while trying to find that e-mail from four years ago with the recipe for cheese puffs in it. Fie on you, Microsoft!

Incidentally, I am fully prepared to believe that there are other search applications that work as well as Google does on my desktop. I've heard good things about X1 and Copernic, and I have no doubt that Macs are perfect in every way, since they always have been and always will be. But I don't care. I downloaded X1 to give it a try, and it informed me that my computer would run slowly for several hours while it indexed my system. Excuse me? I need my computer to work. Google politely told me that it would only index my system during those moments when the computer was idle. Get up to go to the bathroom, and it kicks into action -- hit a single keystroke and it goes back to sleep.

That's great design. I don't actually enjoy reviewing software applications -- the idea of spending all day comparing the speed with which different search programs find obscure stuff strikes me as hellish. What I want is something that works -- and once I have it, I'm not going to look back, or fret that someone else has a better setup than mine.

I'll also concede that Google Desktop Search is far from perfect: The privacy and security aspects are indeed worth pondering. I trust that Google is telling the truth when it says that it is not snarfing up the contents of my hard drive into some server farm in Sunnyvale, Calif., but that's not what worries me. A friend of mine deleted Google Desktop Search once he realized that his teenage son might be innocently searching for something online and accidentally retrieve his father's private e-mails on the same subject.

However, my kids have their own computer, so that's not my problem. The fact is, Google Desktop Search solves problems that have long plagued me, so it's on my computer to stay. And what I find most intriguing is that all of a sudden, I want to make Google Desktop Search happy. I want to change my own behavior to better please it. Normally, I get upset when software doesn't work the way I want it to, and I try to fix the software. But not this time.

For at least a decade, I have appended a ".doc" extension to any word processing document that I create. ".doc" is the default file-type extension associated with Microsoft Word documents, but I use it even when creating documents in my editor of choice, UltraEdit. I can't really explain why -- it's just a habit, an artifact of the days when Word was my primary word processing app.

But Google Desktop Search has a problem indexing files if they have ".doc" extensions, but are not actually Word files. Never mind that all such files on my hard drive are plain text files, and that, if I rename them with a .txt extension, or without any extension at all, Google instantly finds them.

The point of this convoluted anecdote is that I understood immediately that the value of Google Desktop Search to me was so great that I would change my age-old habits instantly to ensure that I gained maximum benefit from the program. I might not be able to figure out how to make Google index those Ultraedit .doc files, but I definitely could immediately stop adding .doc to any new files that I was creating. And so I did. Goodbye, .doc.

The question I'm facing now is, what's next? How else am I going to change at the behest of this software?

In the narrow domain of document management alone, I've spent more hours than I care to remember trying to organize my files so I can find things easily. I've organized by date, by subject, by employer. I've set aside time in my work day just to think about how to better organize things.

And still I can't find what I want when I'm looking for it! Either I've forgotten the system of organization I was using when I filed the document away, or I was too busy to properly file it when I made it or saved it, or the name I gave it doesn't accurately describe it, or some other bungle. The problem has only gotten worse over time, as I move from computer to computer, trailing every file I've ever made behind me.

One hour with Google Desktop Search and I realized that I'll never worry about where to put something again. Not only do I no longer have to remember how to spell, or when something happened, or who is running for president, I now no longer have to remember where anything is!

The implications of this are far greater than just my own gradual, decades-long slide into computer sloth, aided and abetted every step of the way by brilliant software and ever-more-powerful hardware. The clear lesson here is that we work best with computers when we have to think the least. And the next step from not worrying about where stuff is on my computer and where stuff is on the Web, is not worrying about the dividing line between the two.

I've been hanging on to an atavistic faith that my own computer is somehow better than the Web, that the information I store on it is somehow more valuable than the information out on the Web. But my faith is slipping, and I blame Google. Why should I bother with bookmarks if Google can remember every Web page I've ever looked at? Why should I make any distinction between the Net and my hard drive when I'm navigating the information stored on both through the same interface?

I don't think there's much point in denying it any longer. I always thought that the key to making networking computing palatable to the masses would be in making the Net seem like my computer. The paradox is that the reverse turns out to be the case: By making my computer as easy to search as the Net, Google has pushed me irrevocably into the network.

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